that Palin's "celebrity" and "star power" prove that she is bound to be the next President of the United States.

I listened to a radio interview of the leader of Conservatives for Palin the other day....that was his main pitch for Palin. He said that she was able to knock Michael Jackson, and even the President, off the front page news because she has such star power. So, obviously, "she has what it take to be President".

Apparently, we now choose President's like we do an American Idol's. Whoever has the most "star power" wins!!!

Let's look at this.. Jackson was in the headlines longer than Palin's latest freak-show act, so by their own standard's, a dead Michael Jackson is actually MORE qualified than Palin to be President. Also, the week before, Sanford's affair ruled the headlines. So what does that say? Jackson/Palin 2012? or Palin/Sanford 2012?

Is that all it takes to be President of the United States?

I am really saddened by this. What does it say about who we are and what we think about our Country if we choose our President--American Idol style?

I wouldn't worry about Palin. The possibility of Obama being reelected is almost guaranteed by the current recession. It didn't start on his watch, and all he has to do is remind everyone who it was that so royally blew up the water works!

I am really saddened by this. What does it say about who we are and what we think about our Country if we choose our President--American Idol style?

Tee hee hee. I'm really saddened (and amused) by the fact that you're so blinded & slanted with your own liberal idealogy that you don't recognize that people like you did just that in Nov. '08!

Well at least the the winner in 2008 won the popular vote.

My views on some policy questions may come close to those espoused by Palin (if I could actually discern what her views are)but that doesn't stop me from recognizing her gross inadequacies and lack of competence to be in any position of leadership.

The descent into the theatre of the absurd in the aftermath of Michael Jackson's death is more than annoying, since it reinforces and fosters this cultural aberration of fantasy-ridden celebrity worship that has gripped the mass media and increasingly grips a larger and larger portion of our population.

Can't tell whether or not you were being coy about 'MSM'.

Another definition of the acronym is 'MainStream Media'.

I think the poster who used it was using it in the above context.

Where in my last comment did I state or imply that you are a racist? I was addressing the plight of the PUMAs in 2008, something which I think would've been more than obvious. Also, where in any of my posts on this site have I stated or implied that I am a Palin supporter? What I support is at least a modicum of civility in political discussion and analysis, not to mention an end to the blatant misogyny now emanating from the so-called left and numerous media sources.

As for Obama being well informed in his candidate phase, well, where's the evidence for that one? All along, Obama has seemed largely a creature created by the MSM, a ratings driver whose reality has very little relation to the massive hype (one definition of celebrity). Yes, the press liked JFK, but there was something to work with there, something original and far more substantive than what Obama had and has to offer. The volume and pervasiveness of MSM hype in Obama's favor has been nothing short of stunning. In political terms, it's unprecedented. Obama is our first People Magazine president. Who expects that to turn out well?

She's a) attractive as all get up, b) has fantastic name recognition, c) lots of money, d) a dumb as a rock electorate.

The problem with Palin, the reason otherwise reasonable and fairminded people are so vicious with her, is that she is quite capable of convincing many to put her in high office. Other dim-witted, vain, totally inexperienced candidates are immediately dismissed. They may get their time in the spotlight but it undisputably reveals their serious flaws and they fade away. In spite of Palin's weirdness and obvious weaknesses she marches on. Don't be fooled. She has every intention of running for president. And it will take a lot of very uncomfortable and yes harsh words to try and convince people she is completely unworthy of the office.

Whenever the subject of Michael Jackson would come up, it would be drummed into us constantly that he was some sort of eternal adolescent--a Peter Pan--who didn't want to grow up (an image he rigorously cultivated himself).

But he was just an extreme example of that syndrome, for isn't characteristic of our age to always want to seem young, to look youthful, and avoid growing old. Also being young implies being 'innocent', like a child is supposed to be (despite our Christian notion of 'original sin)--and must as such need our protection. Michael Jackson wasn't just youthful but child-like--a state often glorified by German Romantics like Novalis. He deliberately portrayed himself as Peter Pan (the boy who never grew up), surrounded himself with children--as if doing so would exempt him from having to be an adult himself, which his gentleness and shyness prevented him from becoming.

The point of Neverland was that it was set apart from the grown up world, not of it. There Michael Jackson could hide from the world and his family, as well as from the judgmental prejudices of others who regarded him as abnormal (for not embodying our idea of manhood), just as the enchanted cottage provided Oliver Bradford (the disfigured GI played by Robert Young) and Laura Pennington (the homely spinster played by Dorothy McGuire) an escape from his parents and the harsh appraisal of the outside world. Like them, society considered Michael repellent. Hence the need to sequester himself away and create a pretend world of enchantment, a magical kingdom where he didn't have to confront reality but could just wish it away.

However the world can't be willed away. No matter how much Michael tried to promote a mythical notion of himself as a boy forever--like the cute and cuddly boy he was in the Jackson Five--because of course he must have known it was what others found appealing about him; and no doubt was what for a while protected him from racism--the fact is, he wasn't a boy.

For most people, his playing with a toy electric car or having a pet boa constrictor at Neverland would have been akin to, say, a forty year old woman still playing with Barbie.

Plus the fact that he was a grown man who hung out with kids rather than a bevy of sex pots made him suspect because it wasn't an acceptable mode of behaviour for a man to adopt, let alone a pop star, as, say, Hugh Hefner living and bedding three women was. The latter may be thought of as a sleaze, especially by feminists, but he is never thought of as strange for doing so. Men liking to surround themselves with sexy babes is hardly peculiar (not in our culture anyway).

Yet Hefner is a man who has created a sort of erotic Disneyland for his own pleasure, where sex is indulged the way an ice cream is--in order to remain a bachelor forever--just as Michael created Neverland to escape the difficulties of adulthood. One created a fantasy world of recreational sex free from the boredom of monogamy, keeping a throng of buxom female hotties around him; the other created a world in which sexuality with women could be permanently postponed--or in which the latency stage before puberty could be lived out forever and he could frolic with other boys and engage in shared rituals with them. From then on it was just a short step to being rejected by society for behaving unusually.

His keeping company with children, the plastic surgeries that gave him a pixie-like and effeminate appearance, the fact that he (a grown man) built an amusement park at his home, the mystery of his children's paternity or manner of conception, rendered him as inexplicable as Caspar Hauser was to Germans in the late 1820s and early 1830s. And just as Caspar Hauser was accused of making up the story of being kept all his life in a cellar, so Michael Jackson was suspected of being a liar, of being other than what he said he was. Where Hauser was murdered, Jackson underwent self-immolation (as might be expected from someone who portrayed himself as a saint, as if being seen with children were a sign of virtue; unfortunately people could interpret it as signaling you're a paedophile, which happened to U2 when an image of a male child graced the cover of their album: Boy.)

However much we may deplore the amount of interest shown towards Jackson (much of it prurient) this obsession with Michael Jackson's death isn't a phenomenon of celebrity similar to Sarah Palin's, as Kamiya suggests. Mainly, because Michael really had immense talent; his fame is based on real achievement, unlike Palin's. He may not have been Schoenberg or Nijinsky but he was brilliant in his field, a kind of savant if you like. Palin has no accomplishments to speak of (she's done nothing noteworthy). What galls people about Palin is that someone of her mediocrity and asininity is put on a pedestal. She is the product of hype whereas he is the product of talent. Michael's downfall was that he felt he had to sustain his talent via the publicity machine which eventually ate him up. All that stuff about him sleeping in a hyperbaric chamber or buying the bones of the elephant man were orchestrated to keep him in the news. The fact that he would have a statue made of himself is the best indication we have of just how much of a cult he made of his own personality. But it blew up in his face and just made him into a figure of fun when it was supposed to just make him seem like a fascinating personage (a one off). Perhaps our celebrity culture makes self-promotion a necessity to sell talent but in marketing himself Michael became a commodity for consumption. But his humanity was lost in the process.